Speaker Tom S. Foley remembered

The first speaker from west of the Rockies, Foley bridged two painful periods for Democrats. | AP Photo

As chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Foley built his own set of alliances taking advantage of a remarkable convergence of Democratic talent in the committee at the time. And Foley stepped easily into the whip’s position after the 1980 elections when Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) opted to become chairman of the Ways and Means Committee instead.

“Foley’s presence elevated the Agriculture Committee,” said former Rep. Dan Glickman (D-Kan.) who served on the panel then and went on to be secretary of Agriculture in the Clinton administration. “Foley was a real bridge between the urban and rural. Senators (Robert Dole and (George) McGovern get a lot of the credit for food stamps, but Foley was pivotal. We got a lot done in that committee.”

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Wright’s fall in 1989, after a bitter ethics investigation, thrust Foley into the speakership long before he might have expected. It was a time of especially ugly personal politics in Washington. Foley himself was subject to Republican attacks suggesting he might be homosexual, and helping to drive this press coverage were aides to Newt Gingrich who was beginning his own rise in the GOP leadership.

Among Democrats, Foley’s arrival was welcomed with some relief after the turmoil of the Wright years. He was less given to strong arm tactics, and at his first meeting with committee chairman as Speaker, he left the head of the table to sit among his guests.

“Foley can listen forever,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks (D-Tex.) would say, with a mix of admiration and scorn. And in an exchange that would never happen today, then House Rules Committee Chairman Joe Moakley (D-Mass.) told this reporter: “He said you’re in charge. And I said fine.”

But in dealing with the Bush administration then, Foley could be firm too. Former Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), who served then as majority leader, said Foley was insistent that the president put everything on the table for deficit reduction, including taxes, in the 1990 budget agreement. And much as Michel wanted the chance to vote on the Gulf War, Gephardt said the White House initially resisted Foley’s demand for that debate.

Clinton’s election in 1992 gave Foley a Democratic partner at the White House but also a list of tasks that made his party all the more vulnerable in 1994. Hillary Clinton’s health care reform plan —with its employer mandate —stirred up the small business lobby. The 1993 deficit reduction package –adopted without a single Republican vote in the House—made Democrats more vulnerable on taxes. And the 1994 crime bill and assault weapons ban brought out the National Rifle Association, which had been a Foley ally in the past.

Back home all these forces converged on the speaker’s district. This judge’s son and Tory Democrat found himself under assault from a self-styled populist movement that included term-limit advocates, the NRA, and Ross Perot.

He fought back but narrowly lost –the first speaker to have lost his seat at home since the Civil War.

“Many people have grown depressed by what they imagine is an enormously self-indulgent elite in every aspect of our national life,” he said at the time. “That become a problem for everybody in society, including the people believe it, because it is a corrosive untruth.”

“He was one of the nicest and most honest people, I ever worked with,” Gephardt told POLITICO.

“He was a mentor for me,” said former Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.). “He really cared about the institution.”

Like Glickman, Gephardt, and Dicks, Leon Panetta was of the same generation of House Democrats influenced by Foley.

Most Americans know of Panetta for his higher-profile White House and Cabinet posts in the Clinton and Obama administrations, most recently as Defense secretary and Central Intelligence Agency director.

But Foley was Panetta’s Agriculture Committee chairman when the Californian was just a newly-elected freshman assigned to the panel in the 70’s. And as chairman of the House Budget Committee, Panetta worked closely with Speaker Foley in the 1990 deficit reduction talks with Bush.

“Tom Foley was a dear friend, a mentor, and a great public servant,” Panetta said. “I had the honor to serve with him in the Congress and to learn from him the values of duty and service to country. This Congress would do well to remember his example of leadership.”

Foley also served as U.S. ambassador to Japan from 1997 to 2001.

His wife, Heather, told The Associated Press that Foley suffered a stroke last year and was hospitalized in May with pneumonia. He had been on hospice care ever since, she said. He was 84.